Child's Play Becomes More Creative

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Despite the fact that today's kids have less time to play than
previous generations, children's creative play has increased,
recent research finds.

The study seems to oppose earlier findings that children's
creativity has dropped since the 1990s. However, it's
possible that increased creativity in play isn't translating to
creativity in other activities, Case Western University
psychologists Sandra Russ and Jessica Dillon reported in November
2011 in Creativity Research Journal.

Russ and Dillon compared the play of 894 kids tested in 14
separate studies between 1985 and 2008. In each study, the
children were given the same measure of creativity. Researchers
would hand the child two puppets and three blocks and tell them
to play as they wished for five minutes, encouraging the kids to
act out the puppets' voices out loud. These sessions were
videotaped, and researchers then measured the complexity of the
play sessions "plot," the positive and negative emotions in the
child's playtime storyline, as well as the child's comfort,
enjoyment and involvement with the play. [ Top 5
Benefits of Play ]

Most important for the current research, the scientists gauged
each child's creativity based on how many new ideas, characters
and events they acted out in the five minutes, as well as the
fantasy elements and uses for the blocks the kids invented.

Has play changed?

Russ and Dillon compared the results of these experiments over
time, expecting to find that creativity had decreased. After all,
a widely cited 2010 study by College of William & Mary
researcher Kyung Hee Kim found that children's scores on tests of
divergent thinking, an aspect of creativity, had declined over
two decades.

But that's not what Russ and Dillon found. Instead, children's
playtime creativity scores ticked upward a moderate amount
between 1985 and 2008. They also showed more comfort in the play
experiments.

These findings were despite the fact that kids get less practice
at play these days than in the past. In 1989, for example,
surveys by the National Association of Elementary School
Principals found that 96 percent of schools had at least one
recess period. By 1999, only 70 percent of schools could say the
same. Of schools that do have recess, more than half allocate 30
minutes or less a day, according to a 2010 Gallup poll.

There was one cautionary note in the data: After researchers
removed one unusually negative group of children from one school
from the dataset, they found that negative emotions expressed
during pretend play decreased over time. That finding needs a
closer look, according to the researchers.

"Past studies have linked negative emotions in play with
creativity," Russ said in a statement.

Nurturing creativity

The research encompassed only 14 studies, and it's possible that
other measurements might pick up on aspects of play that are in
decline, Russ and Dillon wrote. It's also possible, given
declining scores on creativity tests, that children aren't
translating their
creative play skills to other areas of their lives. However,
the researchers see the hopeful play results as evidence of
children's resilience, despite increasingly limited playtime.

"Children are resilient and may be finding ways to develop
imagination and make-believe abilities other than through play,"
the researchers wrote. Nevertheless, they added, free play is
important for social and emotional development, and parents and
schools should carve out time to let kids be kids.

Editor's Note: This article was updated at
4:15 p.m. to correct a detail in the data analysis. The
researchers removed one unusually negative group of children from
the study of negative emotion, not one unusually negative
child.